Michael B. Druxman has 13 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 14 narrators. The most-rated is Ronald Reagan: Movie Star.
Peter Lorre
Summary
"You know, I can get away with murder. The audience loves me.” - Peter Lorre Peter Lorre was the “master of menace”. From his first film, Fritz Lang’s M, in which he was cast as a child murderer, to his films in England with Alfred Hitchcock, to his stint at Warner Brothers where he played unsavory characters in such movies as The Maltese Falcon, All Through the Night, Casablanca, and Arsenic and Old Lace, to the amusing horror pictures he made with Vincent Price for producer Roger Corman (e.g. The Raven), the Hungarian-born actor made an indelible impression on motion picture audiences for well over 30 years. Lorre’s personal life was also filled with conflict. A half-Jewish fugitive from Hitler’s Europe, the actor was married three times, was the victim of an unscrupulous business manager, and also dealt with an off-and-on addiction to morphine. Peter Lorre, Michael B. Druxman’s one-person stage play, finds the actor in poor health near the end of his life. He contemplates his third divorce and ponders how he will provide for his young daughter, while remembering the greener years that he spent with the likes of Humphrey Bogart, John Huston, and Sydney Greenstreet. One simple set.
©2020 Michael B. Druxman (P)2020 Michael B. Druxman
Tracy
Summary
A one-person play about the life and times of Spencer Tracy. "No pussyfooting around, no beating around George Bush, Tracy is great." - Las Virgines News Enterprise "Michael B. Druxman's piece is by no means the nasty expose that has come to be the fashion in so many recent Hollywood biographies. He shows Tracy reacting with human frailties...but it's mostly an admiring look at the man." - Los Angeles Daily News He's been called "the best film actor Hollywood has ever known". His marvelous performances in classic movies like Captains Courageous, Adam's Rib, Bad Day at Black Rock, and Inherit the Wind endowed him with a tough, solid humorous image - one that was totally at odds with his own personality. The play opens in 1967 when Tracy was in poor health and struggling to complete what would be his final film, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Alone in his rented guest cottage, he reflects with great guilt on his days as a rough street kid in Milwaukee; his troubled marriage; his drinking problem; the birth of his deaf son; and his romances with Loretta Young and Katharine Hepburn. Tracy is a vivid, often witty, portrait.
©1984 Michael B. Druxman (P)2017 Michael B. Druxman
Clifton Webb: A One-Person Play in Two Acts
Summary
Clifton Webb was one of those rare motion picture actors who became a major box-office star when he was in his mid-50s. Indeed, his first sound movie was Laura (1944), and his role as Waldo Lydecker in that classic film noir earned him the first of three Oscar nominations. Four years later, Clifton Webb became a household name when he played Lynn Belvedere and poured a bowl of mush onto a baby's head in Sitting Pretty. He would appear as Belvedere in two subsequent films and also star in such memorable entertainments as The Razor's Edge, Cheaper by the Dozen, Stars and Stripes Forever, Titanic (1953), and Three Coins in The Fountain. Webb was no novice when he began his motion picture career. He started his journey in show business at age five, when his stage mother, Maybelle, left her husband in Indiana and took young Clifton to New York. Maybelle would remain the most important and influential person in her son's life until she died when Webb was in his 70s. Over the years, Webb would become one of the most revered actor-dancers in nightclubs, on Broadway, in London, and in Paris. He introduced Irving Berlin's Easter Parade to the public and worked with the likes of Noel Coward, Fred Allen, and The Dolly Sisters, as well as enjoying troubled relationships with actresses Jeanne Eagels and Libby Holman. Michael B. Druxman's one-person play, Clifton Webb, finds the actor in his Beverly Hills home, still mourning the death of his mother. He ponders returning to work in a new film while, at the same time, struggling with his and Maybelle's unsettled relationship.
©2019 Michael B. Druxman (P)2019 Michael B. Druxman
Miss Audrey Hepburn
Summary
Audrey Hepburn was not your usual movie star. She was the highest paid actress of her day, yet she never took a formal acting lesson. A child of war, and the daughter of a Fascist sympathizer, she spent her last years helping children of other wars. An Academy Award-winner for her first major film role (Roman Holiday), Hepburn continued her storybook career with such classic movies as Sabrina, Funny Face, The Nun's Story, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Charade, My Fair Lady and Wait until Dark. Her two marriages ended in divorce. Michael B. Druxman’s one-woman play, Miss Audrey Hepburn, is set in 1990. It finds the semi-retired actress in her home in Switzerland, filming a television commercial for UNICEF. It's not going well, and during a break, she ponders her life and the "ghosts" that still haunt her.
©2019 Michael B. Druxman (P)2020 Michael B. Druxman
Flynn: A One-Person Play in Two Acts
Summary
A one-person play about the life and times of Errol Flynn. As Captain Blood, Robin Hood, and the Sea Hawk, he was the "King of the Swashbucklers". As Errol Flynn, he was Hollywood's number one rogue. He was married three times, and also was the defendant in three rape trials. Indeed, it's fitting that his last major swashbuckling film cast him in the role of Don Juan. The play joins Flynn a few weeks before his premature death. Knowing that the end is near, he is in a New York airport, waiting to fly west to see his children for the last time. Reminiscing about his life, he talks about his mischievous youth in Tasmania, the mother who always berated him as a "wicked, wicked boy," his days as a New Guinea slave trader, and his Hollywood adventures with the likes of John Barrymore, Jack Warner, Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland and director Michael Curtiz. Amusing, yet tragic, Michael B. Druxman's Flynn is the saga of the screen's most lovable rascal.
©1984 Michael B. Druxman (P)2017 Michael B. Druxman
Dick Powell: A One-Person Play in Two Acts
Summary
Dick Powell made a career of reinventing himself. Born in Arkansas, the young tenor played horn and banjo, and sang with various dance bands and orchestras in Pittsburgh and elsewhere before he was brought to Hollywood, where he sang opposite Ruby Keeler and others in such classic Busby Berkeley musicals as 42nd Street, Footlight Parade, Gold Diggers of 1935, and the Al Jolson film, Wonder Bar. In the mid-1940s, Powell played Philip Marlowe in Murder, My Sweet, which began his period of doing "tough guy" roles in films like Cornered, Johnny O'Clock, and Cry Danger. His astute mind for business led him to invest in real estate, and in the early 1950s, he moved his show-business interests into producing and directing. Along with David Niven and Charles Boyer, he formed Four Star Productions, one of the most prolific production companies in television. Powell was married three times. His second wife was actress Joan Blondell and his third, actress June Allyson, 12 years his junior. Michael B. Druxman's Dick Powell is a one-person play that looks in on the actor at two different periods in his life: during the mid-1940s when he is struggling to reinvent his career from singer to dramatic actor, and the mid-1950s as he deals with billionaire Howard Hughes, producer of director Powell's ill-fated (and deadly) John Wayne-epic film, The Conqueror.
©2019 Michael B. Druxman (P)2019 Michael B. Druxman
Merv: The Final Chapter
Summary
"Fascinating! An intimate biography...an Insight into a whole era of entertainment!” (The Hollywood Reporter) Merv Griffin had a way with stars. They loved him, and he’d given that “big break” to countless young hopefuls who became major celebrities, including Sonny and Cher, Dick Cavett, Richard Pryor, and Tony Orlando and Dawn. Merv was one of America’s best-loved TV personalities. Millions of fans were hooked on his sincerity, intelligence, and showmanship. Merv worked hard to get to the top. Here is the true public, private, and on-stage life of the man who won the hearts of America.
©1976, 1980, 2020 Michael B. Druxman (P)2020 Michael B. Druxman
Abe Vigoda: A One-Person Play in Two Acts
Summary
“I got the role in barney miller because the producer thought I looked tired. I looked tired because I had been jogging earlier that day.” (Abe Vigoda) Abe Vigoda worked as an actor for all of his adult life. He did theatre...He did television... But it wasn’t until he was 50-years-old that he got a role where the public even noticed him. He played Tessio in The Godfather, and after appearing in that classic gangster film, major supporting roles in both films and television series came his way. Most of those roles were gangsters, but then he was cast on the other side of the law. He played Detective Phil Fish on Barney Miller, and, later, he starred in his own series, Fish. Michael B. Druxman’s humorous one-person play, Abe Vigoda, finds the actor with a major problem. The press has, erroneously, announced that he is dead, and his agent’s phone has stopped ringing. Now, Abe has to convince the entertainment industry that he is still with us.
©2020 Michael B. DruxmN (P)2020 Michael B. Druxman
Orson Welles: A One-Person Play in Two Acts
Summary
Orson Welles is a one-person play in two acts about the life and times of Orson Welles. Some say that Orson Welles was a genius, but he always denied that. He did give us Citizen Kane, considered by most critics to be the best film ever made, but after that, his career took one long downward plunge. The play finds Welles trying to find the financing for one of his film projects. It's a difficult task, since most of the Hollywood community considers him to be a "screwball". Pondering his life with his "other self", he tells us about his alcoholic father, his lonely years as a "gifted child", his rise as the "boy genius" of Broadway and the War of the Worlds radio broadcast that panicked America and made his name a household word. But "genius" can be self-destructive - as was the case with Welles. Time after time, with a new post-Kane success within his grasp, he would knowingly make the wrong move, thereby destroying everything he'd built. Containing wry stories about William Randolph Hearst, Columbia Pictures' Harry Cohn, and Rita Hayworth, Michael B. Druxman's Orson Welles is the "boy genius" at his best.
©1986 Michael B. Druxman (P)2012 Michael B. Druxman
Nobody Drowns in Mineral Lake
Summary
Sixteen years have passed, and Jay Barnett returns to the resort town of Mineral Lake with his five-year-old son only to find open hostility, anti-Semitism, and terror. Inspired by true events.
©1999 Michael B. Druxman (P)2020 Michael B. Druxman
Clara Bow
Summary
Clara Blow is a one-woman play in two acts about the life and times of Clara Bow. The "It" Girl was the movies' first American sex goddess. The star of Wings, the first film to win the Best Picture Oscar, Clara Bow's unhappy life, in many ways, paralleled that of her successor, Marilyn Monroe. A longtime victim of insomnia, Ms. Bow lies awake on the morning of her estranged husband's funeral and painfully remembers the mentally ill mother who once tried to kill her; her career as the ultimate "flapper" her many nervous breakdowns; and affairs with the likes of Gary Cooper, Gilbert Roland, director Victor Fleming, and, as is said, the USC football team. Michael B. Druxman's Clara Bow is a tragi-comic tale about another of Hollywood's victims.
©1985 Michael B. Druxman (P)2013 Michael B. Druxman
Gable: A One-Person Play in Two Acts
Summary
A one-person play about the life and times of Clark Gable. "...we actually forget our surroundings and believe we're listening to Gable's life story." (News Enterprise) For nearly 30 years, Clark Gable was "the King" of Hollywood. Female fans swooned, and male admirers were made envious of his unaffected masculinity. Through jaunty, self-assured performances in films like It Happened One Night, San Francisco, Mutiny on the Bounty, and Gone with the Wind, he carved a niche for himself as the quintessential American movie star. The play is set on the Nevada location of Gable's last picture, The Misfits. While waiting for his perennially tardy co-star, Marilyn Monroe, to arrive on the set, Gable reminisces about his Horatio Alger life and career, touching on his stormy relationship with his oil wildcatter father, his marriages to older women, his numerous affairs, and his great love, wife Carole Lombard, who died in a 1942 plane crash...a tragedy from which Gable never recovered. "Insightful", "funny", and "racy" are words that audiences have used to describe Michael B. Druxman's Gable.
©1984 Michael B. Druxman (P)2017 Michael B. Druxman
Ronald Reagan: Movie Star
Summary
Before Ronald Reagan was President of the United States or Governor of California, he was a movie star. He may not have been a major movie star like Clark Gable or John Wayne, but he kept working - in mostly “B” pictures - from the late 1930s to the early 1960s. Certainly his best known films were Knute Rockne - All American (1940), in which he played football legend George Gipp, and Kings Row (1942). Michael B. Druxman’s one-person play, Ronald Reagan: Movie Star, joins the actor in 1949, when he has just lost a major film role to Errol Flynn. Indeed, not much in his life seems to be going well at this time. Divorced from actress Jane Wyman, his recent romance with Patricia Neal has also taken a wrong turn after she discovered Gary Cooper. Will there ever be a light at the end of this tunnel?
©2020 Michael B. Druxman (P)2021 Michael B. Druxman